.

.

In light of the recent public anger over the Monsanto Protection Act, here’s a simple, printable list of companies that use Monsanto products. By avoiding products made by companies on this list, you can help ensure your money isn’t going to Monsanto and also watch out for the health of your family and yourself

.

.

According to new research from the Netherlands, the psychological profile of people who participate in these types of erotic games “is characterized by a set of balanced, autonomous, and beneficial personality characteristics.” Compared to those who engage in more mainstream sexual behavior, such aficionados report “a higher level of subjective well-being.” “We conclude that (these activities) may be thought of as a recreational leisure, rather than the expression of psychopathological processes,” psychologist Andreas Wismeijer of Nyenrode Business University writes in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

The film, Star Wars, premiered on May 25, 1977. Today, on its 36th anniversary, I’m examining the evolution of the film’s logo.

.

.

Regina Dugan, former director of the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) and current head of Google-owned Motorola’s research division, introduced a prototype “vitamin authentication” tablet which turns your entire body into a walking authentication token. “We got to do a lot of epic shit when I was at DARPA,” Dugan said. Indeed, DARPA has been involved in everything from weaponized hallucinations to tiny spy computers to military human enhancements to automated drone-borne targeting and tracking systems to linking rat brains over the internet and much more. Forget traditional usernames and passwords, this technology unveiled at D11 uses a tiny stomach acid-powered tablet to produce an 18-bit signal which can be detected by outside devices and used for authentication.

.

.

A 20-year San Antonio Police Department veteran was ordered Wednesday to serve six months in jail for a bizarre incident last year in which he was found wandering the streets near his wrecked city vehicle, disoriented and without pants. Sgt. Joseph Earl Myers, 53, who resigned almost immediately after the incident, had no explanation for the odd occurrence as state District Judge Melisa Skinner pressed him for answers that have so far eluded authorities. “I made some bad decisions,” Myers said while apologizing, conceding he’d mixed alcohol with the prescription sleep drug Ambien the night before. The former narcotics officer added that he has no idea how cocaine was found in his system, although he doesn’t dispute it was. He’d never used illegal substances before, he said. “I don’t know where I was. I was irrational. I was disoriented,” he told authorities. “I don’t remember leaving the house. I don’t remember taking cocaine.” Thanks Jasmine

.

.

A Lehigh County woman is behind bars for allegedly poisoning burritos and feeding them to her family. Ann Marie Haines cooked up the meal Tuesday night inside her home on Yorkshire Drive in Lower Macungie Township because her husband and daughter didn’t invite her to go along on a car shopping trip, police said. Investigators said Haines crushed up some sort of medication and put it into the burritos, which she then fed to her husband and daughter. They reportedly felt dizzy and tired and had to be taken to the hospital to be checked out.

.

.

In a discussion of efforts to legalize it across the country, Bloomberg said, “There’s no medical. This is one of the great hoaxes of all time.” He went on to make another eyebrow raising statement about how legalizing marijuana will cause other problems. “Drug dealers have families to feed,” Bloomberg said. “If they can’t sell marijuana, they’ll sell something else.” Bloomberg says that “something else” will be worse than pot. “The push to legalize this is just wrongheaded,” Bloomberg added.

.

.

An enormous law enforcement effort seeks to raise prices at every point in the supply chain from farmers to end-users: Eradicating coca crops in source countries, hindering access to chemicals required for drug production, interdicting smuggling routes internationally and within our borders, street-level police actions against local dealers. That’s why this may be the most embarrassing graph in the history of drug control policy. (I’m grateful to Peter Reuter, Jonathan Caulkins, and Sarah Chandler for their willingness to share this figure from their work.) Law enforcement strategies have utterly failed to even maintain street prices of the key illicit substances. Street drug prices in the below figure fell by roughly a factor of five between 1980 and 2008. Meanwhile the number of drug offenders locked up in our jails and prisons went from fewer than 42,000 in 1980 to a peak of 562,000 in 2007.

.

.

Frequent cannabis smokers possess no greater lung cancer risk than do either occasional pot smokers or non-smokers Subjects who regularly inhale cannabis smoke do not possess an increased risk of lung cancer compared to those who either consume it occasionally or not at all, according to data presented in April at the annual meeting of the American Academy for Cancer Research. Investigators from the University of California, Los Angeles analyzed data from six case-control studies, conducted between 1999 and 2012, involving over 5,000 subjects (2,159 cases and 2,985 controls) from around the world. They reported, “Our pooled results showed no significant association between the intensity, duration, or cumulative consumption of cannabis smoke and the risk of lung cancer overall or in never smokers.”

.

.

More than two dozen New Jersey bars caught pouring cheap hooch into top-shelf bottles got away with cheating customers likely because 44 percent of tipplers can’t even taste the difference, a Post survey has found. We enlisted eager volunteers to sample a shot of the $35-a-bottle French-made Grey Goose vodka and a shot of upstate Syracuse’s $8-a-bottle grain vodka Alexis to see whether they could pick the “better” booze. The results were sobering — 22 of the 50 tasters preferred the low-end elixir.

.

.

In an effort to gain a greater buzz for fewer calories, some young drinkers are inhaling their liquor – either pouring it over dry ice or ‘freebasing’ it and sucking up the vapors. Either way, going around the stomach and liver is incredibly risky, doctors say.

.

.

.

.

It was in Germany, though, that the drug first became popular. When the then-Berlin-based drug maker Temmler Werke launched its methamphetamine compound onto the market in 1938, high-ranking army physiologist Otto Ranke saw in it a true miracle drug that could keep tired pilots alert and an entire army euphoric. It was the ideal war drug. In September 1939, Ranke tested the drug on university students, who were suddenly capable of impressive productivity despite being short on sleep. From that point on, the Wehrmacht, Germany’s World War II army, distributed millions of the tablets to soldiers on the front, who soon dubbed the stimulant “Panzerschokolade” (“tank chocolate”). British newspapers reported that German soldiers were using a “miracle pill.” But for many soldiers, the miracle became a nightmare.

.

.

According to a suit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court and reported on by New York Daily News, Greenidge says she was persuaded to try the lipstick at a pop-up shop outside of Barclay’s Arena where the concert was held. “(MAC) didn’t use a fresh or new lipstick tube, but rather one that had been used for other patrons,” the Daily News quotes the suit as charging. Two weeks later, Greenidge says she developed a cold sore. A doctor later alledgedly diagnosed her as having herpes, a condition Greenidge says cost her two weeks of work as a waitress and, according to the suit, “mental anguish and emotional distress” that can only be relieved by an unspecified sum.

.

.

The old saying, “You are what you eat,” poses troubling implications for public health in light of a new study on chicken meat, which found that most of it contains dangerously high levels of toxic arsenic. And the worst part is that industrial chicken producers are directly responsible for causing this, as they intentionally add arsenic-based pharmaceutical drugs to chicken feed in order to bulk them up quickly and improve the color of their meat, which in turn poisons you and your family. You can thank researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in Maryland for exposing this little-known fact in a recent paper published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. As it turns out, virtually all commercial chicken, including certified organic and “antibiotic-free” varieties, contain some level of inorganic arsenic. But it is the conventional chicken fed arsenic-based drugs that have the highest levels.

.

.

As late as last year, the FBI ran a child pornography operation in an attempt to nab its customers. The service ran for two weeks “while attempting to identify more than 5,000 customers, according to a Seattle FBI agent’s statements to the court.” Court records indicate the site continued to distribute child pornography online while under FBI control; the Seattle-based special agent, a specialist in online crimes against children, detailed the investigation earlier this month in a statement to the court.

.

.

This week the company expanded its reach by releasing a free app for iOS and Android that covers the same ground, including a course to “cure” homosexuality. Gay rights organizations are beginning to cry foul, noting that the American Psychiatric Association, among other mental health sources, have denounced “gay-curing” courses as psychologically damaging.

.

.

The New Mexico landfill or “Atari Dump” where the game console maker buried its mistakes — the biggest being the game E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial — will be dug up by game developer Fuel Industries, which hopes to make a documentary about the project. Also known as the “Atari Graveyard” or the “E.T. Dump”, the desert landfill is the spot where Atari decided to permanently off-load tons of games that were sitting unsold in a warehouse in El Paso, Texas, in 1983. So they went to a dump in Alamogordo, N.M. This week the city council voted to allow Fuel to excavate. “That September, according to newspaper accounts, 14 trucks backed up to the dump and dropped their loads,” the blog Western Digs reports. “Company spokespeople told the local press that the waste was mostly broken and returned merchandise — consoles, boxes, and cartidges.”

.

.

But one legal argument has somehow failed to make a major appearance in revenge-porn cases: confidentiality. Broadly speaking, to confide is “to give to the care or protection of another,” and it is often the defining trait of explicit media shared between romantic partners. Simply put, explicit images and videos are unlikely to be created or shared with an intimate without some expectation or implication of confidence. This reality has been acknowledged but underutilized in the dominant narrative on non-consensual pornography. In contrast to new rights that would be created by proposed “anti-revenge porn” laws, confidentiality is already a well-established legal concept. It is older than all of the privacy torts and statutes in America.

.

.

“It seems like they are mostly focused on this program, like the program was the problem. It’s not, it’s the invasion of my family’s Constitutional right to privacy that is the problem, as well as the school allowing a private company access to my child without my consent or permission,” one concerned parent wrote in a Facebook post that has since been shared hundreds of times. “This is stolen information, and we cannot retrieve it.”

.

.

The latest game spawned from the Alien film franchise is being made by Creative Assembly, a game studio in Horsham, UK. It is likely to be one of the first games to explore the potential of Microsoft’s next-generation Kinect sensors for the Xbox One games console. Announced at the same time as the unveiling of the Xbox One last week, the new Kinect is a huge improvement on its predecessor (see “New wave”). It will have HD colour and infrared cameras that can see if your eyes are open or closed in the dark. It will be able to detect your pulse from fluctuations in skin tone and, by measuring how light reflects off your face, it will know when you start to sweat. This will allow the new Kinect to bring emotional gaming to your living room. Games can use the biological data to orchestrate your experience by adjusting the difficulty or intensity in real time, depending on how excited the system thinks you currently are.

.

.

The fish that will be arriving around now, and in the coming months, to California waters may be carrying considerably more radioactivity and if so they may possibly be a public health hazard. Japanese and U.S. officials – of course – are pretending that the amount of radiation found in the bluefin is safe. But the overwhelming scientific consensus is that there is no safe level of radiation … and radiation consumed and taken into the body is much more dangerous than background radiation.

.

.

“You can’t go to Disney without a tour concierge,’’ she sniffed. “This is how the 1 percent does Disney.” The woman said she hired a Dream Tours guide to escort her, her husband and their 1-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter through the park in a motorized scooter with a “handicapped” sign on it. The group was sent straight to an auxiliary entrance at the front of each attraction.

.

.

Nigerian police say they have rescued six pregnant girls from child traffickers who were planning to sell their babies. Two men and a woman have been arrested in the case, which is the second so-called baby factory to be uncovered in a week. Last week, at least 23 girls and four babies were found in Umuaka, in eastern Nigeria’s Imo State.

.

.

This little known story has met a just conclusion, as Sophia Stewart, African American author of The Matrix will finally receive her just due from the copyright infringement of her original work!!! A six-year dispute has ended involving Sophia Stewart, the Wachowski Brothers, Joel Silver and Warner Brothers. Stewart’s allegations, involving copyright infringement and racketeering, were received and acknowledged by the Central District of California, Judge Margaret Morrow presiding. Stewart, a New Yorker who has resided in Salt Lake City for the past five years, will recover damages from the films, The Matrix I, II and III, as well as The Terminator and its sequels. She will soon receive one of the biggest payoffs in the history of Hollywood , as the gross receipts of both films and their sequels total over 2.5 billion dollars.

.

.

Wireless operators have access to an unprecedented volume of information about users’ real-world activities, but for years these massive data troves were put to little use other than for internal planning and marketing. This data is under lock and key no more. Under pressure to seek new revenue streams (see “AT&T Looks to Outside Developers for Innovation”), a growing number of mobile carriers are now carefully mining, packaging, and repurposing their subscriber data to create powerful statistics about how people are moving about in the real world.

.

.

A British judge on Thursday sentenced a businessman who sold fake bomb detectors to 10 years in jail, saying the millionaire had shown a cavalier disregard for potentially fatal consequences. James McCormick made an estimated 50 million pounds ($77.8 million) from the sales of his non-working detectors – which were based on a novelty golf ball finder – to countries including Iraq, Belgium, Niger and Saudi Arabia. McCormick, 57, was convicted of three counts of fraud last month and sentenced Thursday at the Old Bailey court in London, where Judge Richard Hone called his profits from a “callous confidence trick” obscene and outrageous.

.

.

United Nations Twitter Account Follows Porn Star

The official United Nations Twitter account has 1,462,609 followers (or it did at the time this article was published) and only follows 537 accounts – a pretty exclusive club to say the least. For the most part, the 537 accounts @UN follows include world governments, dozens of UN special missions and international heads of states. Buried within that list, however, ConstitutionSchool.com was shocked to discover one account which seemed oddly out of place: “Penelope Black Diamond,” a German porn star whose Twitter username is @BigBustyStar.

‘So, rather surprisingly, we can say that life on earth 1,900 million years ago would have smelled a lot like rotten eggs.’

.

.

It’s no secret that we’re monitored continuously on the Internet. Some of the company names you know, such as Google and Facebook. Others hide in the background as you move about the Internet. There are browser plugins that show you who is tracking you. One Atlantic editor found 105 companies tracking him during one 36-hour period. Add data from your cell phone (who you talk to, your location), your credit cards (what you buy, from whom you buy it), and the dozens of other times you interact with a computer daily, we live in a surveillance state beyond the dreams of Orwell. It’s all corporate data, compiled and correlated, bought and sold. And increasingly, the government is doing the buying. Some of this is collected using National Security Letters (NSLs). These give the government the ability to demand an enormous amount of personal data about people for very speculative reasons, with neither probable cause nor judicial oversight. Data on these secretive orders is obviously scant,

.

.

Dr Nitzan said: ‘All of the patients developed psychotic symptoms related to the situation, including delusions regarding the person behind the screen and their connection through the computer. ‘Two patients began to feel vulnerable as a result of sharing private information, and one even experienced tactile hallucinations, believing that the person beyond the screen was physically touching her. ‘Some of the problematic features of the internet relate to issues of geographical and spatial distortion, the absence of non-verbal cues, and the tendency to idealise the person with whom someone is communicating, becoming intimate without ever meeting face-to-face.’ He added that mental health professionals should not overlook the internet’s influence when speaking to patients. ‘When you ask somebody about their social life, it’s very sensible to ask about Facebook and social networking habits, as well as internet use.

.

.

The State Department of the United States recently released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012, posing as “the world judge of human rights” again. As in previous years, the reports are full of carping and irresponsible remarks on the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions including China. However, the U.S. turned a blind eye to its own woeful human rights situation and never said a word about it. Facts show that there are serious human rights problems in the U.S. which incur extensive criticism in the world. The Human Rights Record of the U.S. in 2012 is hereby prepared to reveal the true human rights situation of the U.S. to people across the world by simply laying down some facts.

.

.

A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name — and no antidote. The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry,” but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment.

.

.

In 1907, six different villages were built in the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale, representing all the corners of the French colonial empire at the time– Madagascar, Indochine, Sudan, Congo, Tunisia and Morocco. The villages and their pavillions were built to recreate the life and culture as it was in their original habitats. This included mimicking the architecture, importing the agriculture and appallingly, inhabiting the replica houses with people, brought to Paris from the faraway territories.

.

.

It’s been dubbed the most expensive prison on Earth and President Barack Obama cited the cost this week as one of many reasons to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which burns through some $900,000 per prisoner annually. The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, which was set up 11 years ago to house foreign terrorism suspects. With 166 inmates currently in custody, that amounts to an annual cost of $903,614 per prisoner. By comparison, super-maximum security prisons in the United States spend about $60,000 to $70,000 at most to house their inmates, analysts say. And the average cost across all federal prisons is about $30,000, they say.

.

.

And in the response to Supreme, he argued that McSweeney had been putting out Supreme Bitch shirts since 2004, when she was 22. Nine years later, Jebbia and Supreme have attempted to sue her for millions of dollars, arguing copyright infringement against the brand. A brand that, by the way, has definitely incorporated other people and other companies’ design elements itself. One of those people? American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, whose work explicitly inspired not just Supreme’s ubiquitous red-and-white logo (see above), but so many other brands like it, and legions of other fairly famous artists as well. But in the past, Kruger—who now teaches at UCLA—has been pretty quiet on the connections, deferring questions about the commercial entrepreneurs who’ve culled from and profited off of the template she inarguably set. But we thought we’d give it a shot, and Complex reached out to Kruger anyway, asking her what she made of the lawsuit, as well as both McSweeney and Jebbia’s p

.

.

When it comes to sex, Germans are not known for being squeamish. Yet a sex-education book that has been circulating in Berlin elementary schools has some parents up in arms. The book, “Where Do You Come From?” (“Wo kommst du her?”), which is recommended for ages 5 and up, shows a couple, Lisa and Lars, in various stages of arousal. In one illustration, Lisa puts a condom on Lars’ erect penis. Another shows them having intercourse. The text also veers toward the explicit. “When it’s so good that it can’t get any better, Lisa and Lars have an orgasm,” it reads. And, finally: “The vagina and penis feel nice and tingly and warm.”

.

.

“We wanted to give people a sense of not only where to put their sexual organs, but where to put their arms and legs,” Ribner says. “If you have never seen a movie, never read a book, how are you supposed to know what you do?”

.

.

By adding all those sub-categories up, imperfect as they may be, it’s clear that the rate of reported overdoses the U.S. more than doubled between 1999 and 2010. About half of those additional deaths are in the pharmaceuticals category, which the CDC has written about before. Nearly three-quarters of the pharmaceuticals deaths are opioid analgesics—prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin. And while cocaine, heroin and alcohol are all responsible for enough deaths to warrant their own stripes on the chart, many popular illegal drugs—including marijuana and LSD—are such a tiny blip as to be invisible.

.

.

“The baby was naked. They strapped tape around her mouth to keep her from screaming. Then they placed her on a board. After calling on the spirits they threw her on the bonfire alive,” said Miguel Ampuero, of the Police investigative Unit, Chile’s equivalent of the FBI. Authorities said the 12-member sect was formed in 2005 and was led by Ramon Gustavo Castillo Gaete, 36, who remains at large. “Everyone in this sect was a professional,” Ampuero said. “We have someone who was a veterinarian and who worked as a flight attendant, we have a filmmaker, a draftsman. Everyone has a university degree. ” Police said Castillo Gaete, the ringleader, was last seen traveling to Peru to buy ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew plant that he used to control the members of the rite.

.

.

SO, the bottom line is this: If you are in a place where you hear steady, and sustained, and nearby (lets call that, for some technical reasons, anything less than 800 meters) gunfire, do these things: Go to your basement. You are cool there. If you don’t have a basement, go to the other side of the house from the firing, and leave, heading away from the firing. Do not stop for a mile. If you do not think that you can leave, get on the ground floor, as far from the firing as possible, and place something solid between you and the firing. Solid is something like a bathtub, a car (engine block), a couple of concrete walls (single layer brick…nope). If you are high up (say 4rd story or higher) just get away from the side of the building where the firing is taking place. You will, mostly, be protected by the thick concrete of the structure. 8. But for cripes sake, do not step out on to your front porch and start recording a video on your iPhone, unless you actually have a death-wish

.

.

“Terrorists want media attention, so we give it to them. Unsafe industries don’t want media attention–so we give that to them.” And that’s exactly what’s going on today, in the coverage of the two disasters last week.

5000 people at 4-20 for UCSC. This guy had a booth set up to unveil this guy, shouldn’t have drawn so much attention man!

.

.

“the ringleader of it all, according to the indictment, is Tavon White, a four-year inmate charged with attempted murder. He reportedly made $16,000 in one month off the smuggled contraband. Four corrections officers–Jennifer Owens, Katera Stevenson, Chania Brooks and Tiffany Linder, who are also facing charges — allegedly became impregnated by White since he’s been in jail. Charging documents reveal Owens had ‘Tavon’ tattooed on her neck and Stevenson had ‘Tavon’ tattooed on her wrist.”

.

.

All Planet Infowars Users that are participating in the Dating Freedom Lovers Mission.

.

.

In its report, Elaph said several religious cops deployed through the festival rushed into the UAE pavilion on Sunday and escorted three Emirati delegates out. “A festival official said the three Emiratis were taken out on the grounds they are too handsome and that the Commission members feared female visitors could fall for them,” the news service said, adding that the festival’s management took urgent measures to deport the three to Abu Dhabi.

.

.

Hundreds of poor people waiting outside of a closed grocery store for the possibility of getting the remaining food is not the picture of the “American Dream.” Yet on March 23, outside the Laney Walker Supermarket in Augusta, Ga., that is exactly what happened. Residents filled the parking lot with bags and baskets hoping to get some of the baby food, canned goods, noodles and other non-perishables. But a local church never came to pick up the food, as the store owner prior to the eviction said they had arranged. By the time the people showed up for the food, what was left inside the premises—as with any eviction—came into the ownership of the property holder, SunTrust Bank. The bank ordered the food to be loaded into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill instead of distributed. The people that gathered had to be restrained by police as they saw perfectly good food destroyed. Local Sheriff Richard Roundtree told the news “a potential for a riot was extremely high.”

.

.

10 Biggest Unsolved U.S. Terrorism Cases

1 Wall Street Bombing (September 16,1920) – New York, New York 38 dead, 143 wounded The detonation of a horse-drawn wagon loaded with 45kg of dynamite and more than 200kg of scrap iron in front of the J.P. Morgan offices in New York remains the deadliest unsolved terrorist incident in U.S. history. Federal agents investigated, and dismissed, the possibility of involvement by Soviet saboteurs, the Communist Party USA and the Industrial Workers of the World. Historians believe the bombing may have been engineered by Italian anarchists.

.

.

It’s been known for decades that animals such as chimpanzees seek out medicinal herbs to treat their diseases. But in recent years, the list of animal pharmacists has grown much longer, and it now appears that the practice of animal self-medication is a lot more widespread than previously thought, according to a University of Michigan ecologist and his colleagues.

.

.

“Originally, the dung-covered beans were collected in coffee plantations but more recently, as more people wanted to drink coffee made from beans that had passed through the intestines of this small carnivore, entrepreneurs have begun sticking civets in cages, feeding them coffee beans and recollecting them from the dung for wholesale,” the paper’s author, Chris Shepherd the deputy regional director with anti-wildlife crime NGO TRAFFIC, told mongabay.com. “Reportedly, as demand rose, other civet species were captured and added to these captive civet coffee makers.”

.

.

Police almost never talk about or claim credit for making the arrests. Police make so many because they are easy arrests and because significant constituencies within police departments benefit from the arrests. Police work can be dangerous. Ordinary patrol and narcotics police like the marijuana arrests because they are relatively safe and easy. If an officer stops and searches 10 or 15 young people, one or two of them will likely have a bit of marijuana. All police have arrest quotas and often they can earn much-desired overtime pay by making a marijuana arrest toward the end of a shift. In New York City, arresting people for petty offenses for overtime pay is called “collars for dollars.” Every cop in the city knows that expression. From the officers’ point of view, people possessing marijuana are highly desirable arrestees. As one veteran lieutenant said, people whose only crime is marijuana possession are “clean,” meaning physically clean. Unlike junkies or winos

.

.

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

.

.

“Super Mario groped the woman,” says Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins. “Elmo was ranting anti-Semitic things. Spider-Man punched a woman in the face. Now a kid was attacked by Cookie Monster. And those are just ones where there’s been an arrest! We’ve anecdotally heard there’s a lot more that’s been happening. One of my staff members said an Elmo patted her backside when she was walking through Times Square on a crowded day.” Tompkins also pointed us to a photo of a man dressed as Toy Story’s Woody urinating in a doorway

.

.

BOOTY-OBSESSED Barbie Edwards has spent a fortune on food to get such a huge backside — but now her big butt is making big bucks. The 42-year-old mum claims she has the world’s largest bottom, and says she has used her unique asset to make a whopping £18,000 in the past six months just by BALANCING things on her behind. The colossal rear measures creating a “butt shelf” upon which Barbie can balance trays of food and drink — to the delight of her paying fans. The bouncy blonde is delighted with her shape and is now hoping to persuade Guinness World Records to include a new category for world’s biggest shelf behind. She said: “I used to hate my big hips and bum, but since I’ve been modelling it’s changed the way I feel about myself. My bum shelf has a career all of its own and I wouldn’t change it.”

.

.

So the very bill that Obama last year claimed was “a good first step” and suggested that “we should do even more in the months ahead”, has now been totally revised and stripped of the most important aspects which promote transparency in the new bill that he has just signed yesterday. Instead of doing more to increase transparency, Congress and President Obama have rolled back the very provisions of the bill which helped promote an open government, in a decidedly non-transparent manner (unanimous voice consent, closed-signing by the president).

.

.

The Hocking County Sheriff’s office is trying to get to the bottom of who is responsible for drugging Laurelville Police Chief Mike Berkemeier. Berkemeier says the problem began Easter Sunday when he ate some cake sitting on his kitchen counter. ”I got up in the morning and ate it — the entire thing,” he said. Shortly after eating that cake, Berkemeier says he began to feel sick like never before. ”I thought I was dying,” he said. Berkemeier says all he could think to do was make the short drive from his home to the Laurelville police station for help. ”I don’t remember much of the drive here, even though it’s just a few blocks and was met by a couple of the medics from the fire department,” he said. Berkemeier tells 10TV medics transported him to Berger Hospital in Circleville where doctors performed tests to see what was wrong with him. ”I kept trying to explain to them this wasn’t getting any better. It just got worse,” he said. “I felt like I was out of my mind.”

.

.

Hijacking airplanes with an Android phone

It’s amazing to discover that aviation – an industry where safety is of vital importance and every physical element has one or even two fail-safe mechanisms – is failing to secure the onboard computer, the heart and brain of the plane.

.

.

There is a national crisis of federal employees engaged in the child porn industry and a related epidemic at the state level. I’ve documented two states, Vermont and Maine, that appear to be running state protected child trafficking rings with evidence of cops, judges, lawyers, clergy and government employees covering for each other. This kind of racketeering creates powerful, and extremely profitable, pedophile rings. Money drives the crime. It is estimated that a criminal willing to molest a child in front of a live webcam can earn $1,000 a night. In Kittery Maine, at the “Danish Health Club,” one bust yielded $6.1 million in “door fees” over a five year period with “prostitutes” earning $12 million. Pimps’ earnings were not reported. The “door man” was a retired police officer whose wife worked in back. This bust happened because of one hard-working IRS agent, Rod Giguere.

.

.

So if THC levels are generally high across the board and the other cannabinoids are present only at trace levels, what makes one strain different from another? And why does each marijuana strain impart a distinct psychoactive effect? There must be something else in the plant that influences the quality of the cannabis high. David Watson, the master crafter of the foundational hybrid Skunk #1, was among the first to emphasize the importance of aromatic terpenes for their modifying impact on THC. Terpenes, or terpenoids, are the compounds in cannabis that give the plant its unique smell. THC and the other cannabinoids have no odor, so marijuana’s compelling fragrance depends on which terpenes predominate. It’s the combination of terpenoids and THC that endows each strain with a specific psychoactive flavor.

.

.

Everyone knows the IRS is our nation’s tax collector, but it is also a law enforcement organization tasked with investigating criminal violations of the tax laws. New documents released to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the IRS Criminal Tax Division has long taken the position that the IRS can read your emails without a warrant—a practice that one appeals court has said violates the Fourth Amendment (and we think most Americans would agree).

.

.

The discovery of a hidden camera may help solve a series of break-ins at upscale homes in several North Texas cities. “This one has already been camouflaged,” said detective Ben Singleton, holding what looks like a piece of bark that would go unnoticed in most yards. It’s actually a video camera not much bigger than a matchbox, and it’s activated by a motion detector. Such cameras turned up in March planted outside several upscale homes in Dalworthington Gardens. “I’ve never seen anything like this. And most detectives in this area haven’t,” Singleton said. Earlier this month, John Anton discovered the first one near his driveway. “I had no idea what it was,” Anton said. “Very strange.” He took the device to Dalworthington Gardens police. “We tore one of these apart to figure out what it was all about,” Singleton said. The detective said it turned out to be surveillance for a long-running, sophisticated burglary scheme. But at first, police feared it might even be a kidnapping plot to

.

.

Elites tend to believe in a venal, selfish, and essentially monstrous version of human nature, which I sometimes think is their own human nature. I mean, people don’t become incredibly wealthy and powerful by being angelic, necessarily. They believe that only their power keeps the rest of us in line and that when it somehow shrinks away, our seething violence will rise to the surface—that was very clear in Katrina. Timothy Garton Ash and Maureen Dowd and all these other people immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started writing commentaries based on the assumption that the rumors of mass violence during Katrina were true. A lot of people have never understood that the rumors were dispelled and that those things didn’t actually happen; it’s tragic.

.

.

The annual Drug & Alcohol Testing Industry Association (DATIA) conference, held in 2012 in San Antonio, Texas, looks like any other industry gathering. The 600 or so attendees sip their complimentary Starbucks coffee, munch on small plates of muffins and fresh fruit, and backslap old acquaintances as they file into a sprawling Marriott hotel conference hall. They will hear a keynote address by Robert DuPont, who served as drug policy director under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Nothing odd about any of this until you consider that the main subject of the conference is urine.

.

.

Once banned from the world of mainstream comic books by the infamous Comics Code Authority, LGBT characters now have a stronger presence in the world of superhero comics than ever before, with gay and lesbian heroes like Batwoman, Northstar and Green Lantern Alan Scott openly declaring who they are — and even getting married. Today, DC Comics told Wired that it will continue to expand the LGBT diversity of its superhero universe by introducing the first openly transgender character in a mainstream superhero comic.

.

.

A remarkable thing happened in 2008: drug overdose surpassed auto fatalities as the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. Public health officials declared an epidemic, and communities united to battle this new enemy that had left a staggering body count in its wake. The people had a weapon, naloxone, an antidote that reverses opiate overdose, and programs began popping up across the country to provide training and free naloxone to people at risk for overdose. But then Big Pharma stepped in. The same year that naloxone became so critical to saving lives, one pharmaceutical company secured a monopoly on its production and jacked up the prices by 1,100%.

Bet you didn’t think you needed semen pills.

.

.

Riot Toys

.

.

A blackout disabled cooling at four fuel pools last month, an event the company traced to a rat that might have gnawed on power cables and caused a short circuit. Engineers found its scorched body in a damaged switchboard. Tepco has since installed mousetraps at the site and promised to plug holes through which rats and other rodents might enter buildings and gnaw on important equipment. It has also promised to speed up work to install backup power cables to the fuel pools. But Friday afternoon, four workers using wire meshing to seal a space around electric cables caused a ground fault, or the accidental flow of current to the ground. No one was injured, but the ground fault shut off electricity to the cooling system at the No. 3 reactor fuel pool. “We were installing wire nets to keep the rats out. But the end of one of the wires may have momentarily come into contact with a live terminal,” said Masayuki Ono, general manager at Tepco’s Nuclear Power and Plant Siting Division. “…

.

.

People seem to have a love-hate relationship with dogs dressed up like humans, but that hasn’t stopped the Internet from churning out more ridiculous memes. The latest installment: Dogs wearing pantyhose (OK, we’re classing it up a bit, Dis Magazine called it “bitches wearing pantyhose”) is a trend picking up in China, according to Sharp Daily, a Hong Kong news site.

.

.

At the height of his use, the man – known as “Mr A” – was taking 25 tablets a day, Psychosomatics journal revealed. The 37-year-old still had trouble with short-term memory problems seven years after he stopped taking the drug. Doctors at St George’s Hospital, London said Mr A’s case was extreme, but showed ecstasy’s long-term effects. It is possible to become psychologically dependent on the feelings associated with ecstasy but heavy daily use is extremely rare and it is not thought that people can become physically dependent Martin Barnes, DrugScope The doctors said it was the largest reported ecstasy lifetime consumption by one person, the previous being around 2,000 tablets. Writing in Psychosomatics, they say Mr A reported he had used ecstasy between the ages of 21 and 30. For two years, he took five tablets every weekend, rising to an average of 3.5 tablets per day for the next three years, then soaring to 25 tablets a day over the next four years.

.

.

Did you know that there are thousands upon thousands of homeless people that are living underground beneath the streets of major U.S. cities? It is happening in Las Vegas, it is happening in New York City and it is even happening in Kansas City. As the economy crumbles, poverty in the United States isabsolutely exploding and so is homelessness. In addition to the thousands of “tunnel people” living under the streets of America, there are also thousands that are living in tent cities, there are tens of thousands that are living in their vehicles and there are more than a million public school children that do not have a home to go back to at night. The federal government tells us that the recession “is over” and that “things are getting better”, and yet poverty and homelessness in this country continue to rise with no end in sight. So what in the world are things going to look like when the next economic crisis hits?

.

.

Amsterdam is to create “Scum villages” where nuisance neighbours and anti-social tenants will be exiled from the city and rehoused in caravans or containers with “minimal services” under constant police supervision.

.

.

America won’t be repeating that historic one small step anytime soon — not according to NASA chief Charlie Bolden, anyway. “NASA is not going to the Moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime,” Bolden told a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board in Washington last week

.

.

As many of you may know, and may have heard in the news recently, many of my sermons have deviated from traditional Christian doctrine. I have been accused of altering the ‘message’ to fit my own doctrine and dogma. Others have accused me of preaching ‘feel good Christianity’. I have also been accused of profiting greatly from my ministry, with my books and television deals. Many of their criticisms are legitimate. What they don’t know is that deep down in my heart, for a number of years now, I have been questioning the faith, Christianity and whether Jesus Christ is really my, or anyone’s, ‘savior’. I believe now that the Bible is a fallible, flawed, highly inconsistent history book that has been altered hundreds of times. There is zero evidence the Bible is the holy word of God. In fact, there is zero evidence “God” even exists. No God worth believing in is going to send you to Hell for not believing in him. Not even the worst sinner and scum of the Earth deserves eternal torment

For the last two years, the young girl never used make-up removers, so her mother, exasperated by Bae’s behaviour, contacted a TV station and told them Bae’s incredible story. During a variety show, dermatologists managed to convince Bae Dal-mi to finally remove the layers of make-up, and after a specialized check-up they found her skin was two times older than her actual age. All because of an obsession with beauty

A faulty battery caused an electronic cigarette to explode in a man’s mouth, taking out some of his front teeth, a chunk of his tongue and severely burning his face, fire officials said.

The Guinness World record was 250. Janine Keblish topped that by two pairs of underwear. Why? Keblish wanted to bring attention to a cause she’s involved with, Days for Girls. A few years ago Keblish and Celeste Mergens discovered a shameful secret on a trip to an orphanage in Kenya – a total lack of feminine hygiene products for young women. “Millions of women all over the world go without, resulting in infection and exploitation and even girls being sold into slavery. They also miss three months of education each year, just for lack of hygiene,” says Mergens. “And you wonder, how could this be happening in this day and age? The truth is, it’s taboo to talk about.”

The high incidence of open defecation in the Indian state of Bihar is not due to a lack awareness about toilets, according to this new Water for People video. In their view, it’s more of a supply chain, marketing problem. The toilets on offer are not particularly good.

It’s not every day that you receive a coupon for one of the priciest beverage chains in the world! Armed with my Starbucks Rewards card, I decided to take the opportunity to find out just how much money I could pour into a Trenta—Starbucks’ whopping 31 ounce cup! After about a half-hour with a laughing barista, we created the most expensive drink possible: one Java Chip Frappuccino in a Trenta cup, 16 shots of espresso, a shot of soy milk, caramel flavoring, banana puree, strawberry puree, vanilla beans, Matcha powder, protein powder, and a drizzle of caramel and mocha. Price: $23.60. The resulting beverage contains 1400mg of caffeine. According to Erowid, a widely respected drug catalog, a heavy caffeine dose is 400+mg. This drink has 3 times that. If I drank this all at once, it would put me in the hospital. Two of these would kill me.

Many strange archeological discoveries have been made in modern history. Hundreds of artifacts have been unearthed that have baffled scientists and challenged modern man’s view of history. Many of these objects have been labeled out of place artifacts or anachronisms. These archeological discoveries are always controversial and the scientific community is extremely selective in what they accept as fact. Every object on this list has been accused of being an elaborate hoax. In many cases, a conspiracy is the only explanation, without an extensive rewriting of the world’s history books. These artifacts tell a story of ancient civilizations, Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contracts, and mysterious technological advancements. Many of these archeological discoveries challenge the scientific theory of evolution, as well as many religious beliefs.

✰ Elderly junkies find ‘freedom’ at Dutch old-age home

In a tiny fourth-floor room overlooking The Hague’s city centre, a grey-haired man carefully plugged a small pipe with a ball of cocaine, lit up and drew a deep breath. “This is real freedom,” said 65-year-old William as a billow of white smoke poured from his nostrils and wafted through his apartment at Woodstock, the only Dutch home for elderly junkies and other addicts. The apartment block, flanked by a canal and a tram line, takes a unique approach to drug abuse by helping to keep ageing homeless people off the city’s streets and out of trouble with the law. “I like it here. Here there is no police watching you,” William told AFP as he rearranged the paraphernalia of his addiction on a small table: a pipe, a lighter, a mirror with traces of cocaine lines and an old credit card. “I can do what I want to do.”

✰ NH town to vote on whether to change name of pond at bishop’s urging

Voters in a small New Hampshire town will have the final say on whether to change the controversial name of a local pond. The small pond near the middle of Mont Vernon is known as Jew Pond. Town officials say it got its name back in the 1920s because the operators of a hotel that once stood next to it were Jewish. The name recently got the attention of New Hampshire Bishop Peter Libasci. He wrote a letter to the local newspaper saying the name conveyed contempt and urged townspeople to change it. Residents will decide in the March 13 election. Some residents told WMUR-TV that they don’t find the name offensive and that it’s part of the town’s history.

✰ Exposing the Severity of the Fukushima Disaster (Video)

Fukushima has had 5 major meltdowns now, in a disaster that is making experts say that it is larger than Chernobyl. Aljazeera reported in September that the radiation emitted from Fukushima would rival or surpass Chernobyl in only the weeks following the disaster. According to Aljazeera: “Experts say that the total radiation leaked will eventually exceed the amounts released from the Chernobyl disaster that the Ukraine in April 1986. This amount would make Fukushima the worst nuclear disaster in history.” This news was from 2011, but the current news isn’t much better. After officials said they were going to perform a ‘cold shutdown’ to prevent any further issues, its now come out that the Fukushima reactor temperature now surpasses 752 degrees — whereas 100 degrees celsius was required for the cold shutdown. Tepco, the operators of the plant, say the thermometer is conveniently broken, but they have been known to conceal the truth from the public in the past.

The fight occurred between residents of a tenement with shared facilities, a common situation in India’s densely populated financial matrix. The incident brings India’s sanitation problems and the lack of proper facilities sharply into focus. Simon Lingeree was killed last month when he got into a heated argument with Santosh Kargutkar while using a public toilet. The latter became highly impatient while waiting his turn. When Mr. Lingeree exited the toilet, he was physically assaulted. There were no weapons involved, just fists, but the young man was struck a fatal blow to the crotch. The killer quickly fled the scene and was later arrested.

The strong odor of marijuana from the evidence room at a local police station in Florida seems to be a real problem for some whiny cops. “The biggest complaint is how strong the odor is,” said Atlantic Beach Police Commander Victor Gualillo, reports ActionNewsJax.com. All seized dope collected during busts is stored in a 200-square-foot evidence room at the station. “Anytime you store that much marijuana it’s rather pungent,” Commander Gualillo complained. But it seems you count on this bunch of overwrought weenies to dramatize the situation way beyond just the smell. They’re talking about “doing something” before “somebody gets hurt.” “I’m told there are serious health concerns,” claimed Atlantic Beach City Manager Jim Hanson about all the collected drugs in the evidence room. “There are other evidence technicians who have gotten sick,” Hanson claimed.

Adrian Watson, 41, was arrested by police after neighbours complained of a strong smell of gas coming from a house in Huddersfield Road, Elland. Bradford Crown Court heard how officers at first thought there may have been a leak, but after entering the property found 24 cannabis plants and growing equipment. They also found documents in the house with Watson’s name on and another address in Dewsbury Road, Elland, where they later found Watson as well as more cannabis. A total of 2.24kg of the drug was found, with a street value of around £19,000. Police experts believe there was enough cannabis to last up to 594 days, but Watson told police that his habit of 15 joints a day meant he would have got through the drug much quicker. He admitted producing cannabis for personal use.

News has come from France that some captive-born dolphins there have been recorded “talking in their sleep” — and talking in Whale, no less, not Dolphinese. The scientists involved say this would be the first time that dolphins have been recorded mimicking sounds a significant period of time after hearing them. But there’s also the intriguing possibility that these sounds — virtually identical to sounds made by the humpback whale — may, if the dolphins are really asleep and not just resting, be direct expression of something the dolphins are dreaming.

“The sale of drugs (like K-72 and K-76) which have cobra venom is increasing at rave parties and in discos. These drugs enhance sensation and boost energy so that revellers can dance for longer hours,” a senior officer of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) told IANS on condition of anonymity. “The sales increase a week before Valentine’s Day in Delhi and NCR (National Capital Region) and are consumed at hushed-up parties,” he added.

✰ Morgellons: Static Electricity or Moving Nano-Machines? You Decide

Contrary to what the CDC says, Morgellons is not a delusion. I have personally felt and seen my hair move by itself, I’ve had strange fibres come out of my skin, I constantly feel like there are bugs crawling over my body. I have witnessed many of my fresh organic vegetables, fruits and meat moving by itself, causing me to have to throw out the majority of the food I’ve bought. I have had to stop wearing a lot of my clothes because even those seem to be comprised of moving fibres. Some might say the fibres in the video below are moving because of static electricity, however I find that very hard to believe.

Last year in three high schools in Florida, several undercover police officers posed as students. The undercover cops went to classes, became Facebook friends and flirted with the other students. One 18-year-old honor student named Justin fell in love with an attractive 25-year-old undercover cop after spending weeks sharing stories about their lives, texting and flirting with each other. One day she asked Justin if he smoked pot. Even though he didn’t smoke marijuana, the love-struck teen promised to help find some for her. Every couple of days she would text him asking if he had the marijuana. Finally, Justin was able to get it to her. She tried to give him $25 for the marijuana and he said he didn’t want the money — he got it for her as a present. A short while later, the police did a big sweep and arrest 31 students — including Justin. Almost all were charged with selling a small amount of marijuana to the undercover cops. Now Justin has a felony hanging over his head.

‘During the eight years it took James and Karla Murray to complete this project, one third of the stores they featured have closed’

The federal government has been paying lip service to the idea that it wants to encourage new businesses and startups in the US. And this is truly important to the economy, as studies have shown that almost all of the net job growth in this country is coming from internet startups. Thankfully some politicians recognize this, but the federal government seems to be going in the other direction. With the JotForm situation unfolding, where the US government shut down an entire website with no notice or explanation, people are beginning to recognize that the US is not safe for internet startups.

A software development student from York who hacked into Facebook has been jailed for eight months. Glenn Mangham, 26, had earlier admitted infiltrating the social networking website between April and May 2011. Mangham, of Cornlands Road, York, had shown search engine Yahoo how it could improve security and said he wanted to do the same for Facebook. Sentencing Mangham, Judge Alistair McCreath said his actions could have been “utterly disastrous” for Facebook. Alison Saunders, from the Crown Prosecution Service, described the case as “the most extensive and flagrant incidence of social media hacking to be brought before British courts”. Prosecutor Sandip Patel rejected Mangham’s claims, saying: “He acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating.” Facebook spent $200,000 (£126,400) dealing with Mangham’s crime, which triggered a “concerted, time-consuming and costly investigation” by the FBI and British law enforcement, Mr Patel said.

We hear a lot about zombies these days – in films, in music and even in philosophy – but many are unaware that in 1997 The Lancet published a medical study of three genuine Haitian zombies. The cases studies were reported by British anthropologist Roland Littlewood and Haitian doctor Chavannes Douyon and concerned three individuals identified as zombies after they had apparently passed away. The Haitian explanation for how zombies are created involves the distinction between different elements of the human being – including the body, the gwobon anj (the animating principle) and the ti-bon anj, which represents something akin to agency, awareness, and memory.

After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, all bets were off for live musicians who played in movie theaters. Thanks to synchronized sound, the use of live musicians was unnecessary — and perhaps a larger sin, old-fashioned. In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound. The evil face of that campaign was the dastardly, maniacal robot. The Music Defense League spent over $500,000, running ads in newspapers throughout the United States and Canada. The ads pleaded with the public to demand humans play their music (be it in movie or stage theaters), rather than some cold, unseen machine.

Swiss authorities have confiscated $6 trillion in counterfeit U.S. bonds at the request of Italian prosecutors, authorities in Italy said Friday. Eight people were arrested in Italy and placed under investigation for fraud and other crimes. The bonds, carrying the false date of issue of 1934, had been transported in 2007 from Hong Kong to Zurich, where they were transferred to a Swiss trust, according to prosecutors in the southern Italian city of Potenza. Authorities said that U.S. officials had confirmed the bonds were counterfeit. Prosecutors said the fraud had not been completed, but it appeared that the suspects intended to try to sell the fake bonds to a developing nation, directly or through an intermediary bank.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has once again proven that the only thing Americans need fear, is their own government, with the latest “terror attack” foiled being one entirely of their own design. USA Today reports that a suspect had been arrested by the FBI who was “en route to the U.S. Capitol allegedly to detonate a suicide bomb.” While initial reports portrayed the incident as a narrowly averted terrorist attack, CBS would report that a “high ranking source told CBS News the man was “never a real threat.”” The explosives the would-be bomber carried were provided to him by the FBI during what they described as a “lengthy and extensive operation.” The only contact the suspect had with “Al Qaeda” was with FBI officials posing as associates of the elusive, omnipresent, bearded terror conglomerate. The FBI, much like their MI5 counterparts in England, have a propensity for recruiting likely candidates from mosques they covertly run.

Three U.S. lawmakers urged the Federal Trade Commission to grill Google after it admitted secretly tracking millions of people’s iPhone and Mac Web browsing. Reps. Edward Markey, D-Mass., Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said they want to know whether Google’s behavior “constitutes a violation” of a privacy settlement Google Inc. and the commission worked out last year. Google pledged at the time not to “misrepresent” its privacy practices to consumers. The fine for violating the agreement is $16,000 for every violation each day. Google and three other advertising companies used special computer code that tricks Apple Inc.’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor users’ Internet habits — even though Safari, the most-widely used smartphone Web browser, is designed to block such tracking by default.

Simply put, it is difficult to distinguish a law requiring women to be vaginally penetrated by a long metal object from state-sponsored rape. Worse, discussions among lawmakers leave little doubt that its supporters understood just what they were trying to write into law — they just didn’t care. As an unnamed lawmaker told a fellow Virginia delegate, a woman already consented to being “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.”

John Muir must be rolling over in his grave. The organization he founded in 1892, the Sierra Club, America’s oldest and largest environmental group, have been in cahoots with the worst of the worst corporations in recent years. They’ve been paid tens of millions of dollars by the fossil fuel industry, tyrannical billionaire mayors and Wall Street in exchange for cleaning (and greening) up their public images. Not only have they acted as a green public relations firm for the bastions of wealth and power, but have also sold out frontline communities most impacted by extractive industry.

Marketing professors Anastasiya Pocheptsova and Rosellina Ferraro, with graduate student, Ajay T. Abraham, conducted a series of experiments on test groups of cellphone users. The findings appear in their working paper, “The Effect of Mobile Phone Use on Prosocial Behavior.” Prosocial behavior, as defined in the study, is action intended to benefit another person or society as a whole. The researchers found that after a short period of cellphone use the subjects were less inclined to volunteer for a community service activity when asked, compared to the control-group counterparts. The cell phone users were also less persistent in solving word problems — even though they knew their answers would translate to a monetary donation to charity. The decreased focus on others held true even when participants were merely asked to draw a picture of their cellphones and think about how they used them.

Poachers have slaughtered at least 200 elephants in the past five weeks in a patch of Africa where they are more dangerously endangered than anywhere else on Earth, wildlife activists said. The money made from selling elephant tusks is fueling misery throughout the continent, the International Fund for Animal Welfare warned. Many elephant calves orphaned by the recent killings have been spotted in Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjida National Park, and activists fear the animals may soon die of hunger and thirst. “Their deaths will only compound the impact of the poaching spree on the Cameroon’s threatened elephant populations,” the organization said Thursday in a statement. It is not known how many elephants remain in the West African nation. The latest figures from the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated there were only 1,000 to 5,000 left in 2007.

The internet is broken – we need to start over … Last year, the level and ferocity of cyber-attacks on the internet reached such a horrendous level that some are now thinking the unthinkable: to let the internet wither on the vine and start up a new more robust one instead. On being asked if we should start again, many – maybe most – immediately argue that the internet is such an integral part of our social and economic fabric that even considering a change in its fundamental structure is inconceivable and rather frivolous. I was one of those. However, recently the evidence suggests that our efforts to secure the internet are becoming less and less effective, and so the idea of a radical alternative suddenly starts to look less laughable.

The existence of these clusters is so little known that most people don’t realize when they’re nearing the epicenter of Fort Meade’s, even when the GPS on their car dashboard suddenly begins giving incorrect directions, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals. It’s an experiential trap street—an infinite loop—a deliberate cartographic error introduced into the mapping of the world so as to sow detour and digression. A kind of digital baffling, or recursive geography as state defensive tactic. I’m also curious when we might see this privatized and domesticated—gated communities, for instance, blocking the GPS navigation of their streets in the misguided belief that this will help protect them from future burglary, effectively delisting themselves from public cartographic records. Perhaps the future of neighborhood security lies in the privatized repurposing of advanced signal-jamming technology

✰ Pa. man’s Facebook ‘surfer’ page lured teens

A married father used phony Facebook profiles to pose as two different Florida surfers to solicit sexually graphic messages and photos from seven teenage girls in western Pennsylvania, and two of the girls eventually agreed to meet for sex with the surfers’ middle-aged “friend” — yet another fake persona he used, the state attorney general said Friday. William R. Ainsworth, 53, of Mars, was charged Thursday with 68 counts, including involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and multiple counts of charges that include attempted unlawful contact with a minor, possession of child pornography and criminal use of a computer.

The address book in smartphones — where some of the user’s most personal data is carried — is free for app developers to take at will, often without the phone owner’s knowledge. Companies that make many of the most popular smartphone apps for Apple and Android devices — Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram among them — routinely gather the information in personal address books on the phone and in some cases store it on their own computers. The practice came under scrutiny Wednesday by members of Congress who saw news reports that taking such data was an “industry best practice.” Apple, which approves all apps that appear in its iTunes store, addressed the controversy on Wednesday after lawmakers sent the company a letter asking how approved apps were allowed to take address book data without users’ permission. Apple’s published rules on apps expressly prohibit that practice.

The stocky man showed up in a basketball uniform for a game at Century High School in North Dakota. Players and coaches assumed he was a fan who had come with another team, so nobody objected when he began to pitch in around the bench. “He helped lay out uniforms, got water. He even gave a couple of kids shoulder massages. Creepy stuff like that,” said Jim Haussler, activities director for the Bismarck Public School District. After the game was over, the man joined the winning team on the court and asked if he could get a piggyback ride. One bemused player gave it to him. “He makes himself appear as if he’s limited or handicapped. I think he plays an empathy card, so to speak,” Haussler said. “We didn’t realize what we were dealing with until several days later.”

Sir Paul has a self-confessed passion for marijuana. He has also been in trouble for drugs more times than bandmate John Lennon ever was, despite Lennon’s reputation as a heavy user. Sir Paul, 69, was introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan, who was stunned to learn he was a ‘pot virgin’ – in the mid-Sixties. After that came heroin, cocaine, LSD and a range of other psychedelics which inspired some of the Beatles’ best known songs. Sir Paul’s rap sheet for drugs is almost as long as his list of hits. He was arrested for cannabis possession in Sweden and at his Scottish farm in 1972.

It says that “a Los Angeles Superior Court commissioner has awarded Heather Peters $9,867.” As was discussed last month on All Things Considered, “Peters decided to opt out of a class-action settlement that would have given her as little as $100 and awarded the attorneys $8.5 million. The 46-year-old Los Angeles resident, who is also a lawyer, decided to even the playing field by filing her suit in a small claims court, which doesn’t allow the parties to retain lawyers.” Her case: Peters showed that ads had claimed her Honda Civic hybrid would get 50 miles per gallon. In court, as Eyder previously wrote, “she came armed with hundreds of pictures of her dashboard showing that she got at best 42 miles per gallon and after a software update that number dropped to fewer than 30 miles per gallon.”

A neighborly dispute over dog poop turned deadly in the Tacony section of Philadelphia. It happened just after 4 p.m. Tuesday on the 6500 block of Torresdale Avenue. Tyrirk Harris, 27, is accused of killing his 47-year-old neighbor Franklin Manuel Santana, according to Philadelphia Police. Cops say Santana walked a couple doors down Torresdale to confront Harris over his dogs. “A German Shepherd and a Chihuahua — these dogs were running free,” said Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small. “There were dog feces on several of the neighbor’s yards. That’s what led to this particular confrontation.” Police say Harris then pulled out a 9-mm handgun and shot his neighbor several times, striking Santana in his face and chest.

Computer hackers known as Anonymous leaked information obtained by hacking into private intelligence firm Stratfor’s computer network. The documents – what Anonymous is calling a teaser – suggest that from at least October to November 2011 Stratfor worked with Texas law enforcement to infiltrate the Occupy movement and spy on the Deep Green Resistance movement. The document contains emails in which Stratfor employees discuss Occupy Austin and Deep Green Resistance. Stratfor “Watch Officer” Marc Lanthemann writes about receiving information on Occupy Austin and DGR from a “Texas DPS agent.” The Texas Department of Public Safety is a statewide law enforcement agency that includes an Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division.

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is it’s justice; that is it’s morality.” – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 19th century French philosopher

David Choe has received a world wind of media attention after the story broke that he is holding $200 million worth of Facebook stock after painting their offices in 2005. Barbara Walters recently met up with Choe for an interview, and to hit the streets. Check out the hilarious video.

Not only were the smaller farms concerned over how the manufactured seeds had been carried by wind and creature alike onto their own plantations, but the biggest problem perhaps was that Monsanto was filing lawsuits themselves against farmers. Monsanto went after hundreds of farmers for infringing on their patented seed after audits revealed that their farms had contained their product — as a result of routine pollination by animals and acts of nature. Unable to afford a proper defense, competing small farms have been bought out by the company in droves. As a result, Monsanto saw their profits increase by the hundreds of millions over the last few years as a result. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto tackled 144 organic farms with lawsuits and investigated roughly 500 plantations annually during that span with a so-called “seed police.”

The average American uses enough water each year to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and global agriculture consumes a whopping 92% of all fresh water used annually. Those are the conclusions of the most comprehensive analysis to date of global water use, which also finds that one-fifth of humankind’s water consumption flows across international borders as “virtual water”—the water needed to produce a commodity, such as meat or electronics, if the ultimate consumers were to make it themselves rather than outsource its growth or manufacture.

When Ellen Terrell and her husband, Charlie, flew out of DFW Airport several months ago, Terrell says she was surprised by a question a female TSA agent asked her. “She says to me, ‘Do you play tennis?’ And I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘You just have such a cute figure.’” Terrell says she walked into the body scanner which creates an image that a TSA agent in another room reviews. Terrell says she tried to leave, but the female agent stopped her. “She says, ‘Wait, we didn’t get it,’” recalls Terrell, who claims the TSA agent sent her back a second time and even a third. But that wasn’t good enough. After the third time, Terrell says even the agent seemed frustrated with her co-workers in the other room. “She’s talking into her microphone and she says, ‘Guys, it is not blurry, I’m letting her go. Come on out.’” When TSA agents do a pat down on a traveler, only female agents are allowed to touch female passengers. But the TSA allows male agents to view the images of female passengers.

Gonorrhea, one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the United States, is increasingly showing resistance to one of the last known effective antibiotic treatments, leading researchers from the Centers for Disease Control to “sound the alarm” about potentially untreatable forms of the disease. “During the past three years, the wily gonococcus has become less susceptible to our last line of antimicrobial defense, threatening our ability to cure gonorrhea,” Gail Bolan, director of the CDC’s sexually transmitted disease prevention program, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine last week.

Arthur C. Clarke once famously quipped that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So perhaps it was inevitable that the Pentagon’s extreme technology arm would eventually start acting like magicians — and try to create illusions on the front lines. In its new budget, unveiled on Monday, Darpa introduced a new $4 million investigation into technologies that will “manage the adversary’s sensory perception” in order to “confuse, delay, inhibit, or misdirect [his] actions.” Darpa calls the project “Battlefield Illusion.” Of course. “The current operational art of human-sensory battlefield deception is largely an ad-hoc practice,” the agency sighs as it lays out the project’s goals. But if researchers can better understand “how humans use their brains to process sensory inputs,” the military should be able to develop “auditory and visual” hallucinations that will “provide tactical advantage for our forces.”

Do devastating hurricanes need help from affirmative action? A member of Congress apparently thinks so, and is demanding the storms be given names that sound “black.” The congressional newspaper the Hill reported this week that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, feels that the current names are too “lily white,” and is seeking to have better representation for names reflecting African-Americans and other ethnic groups. “All racial groups should be represented,” Lee said, according to the Hill. She hoped federal weather officials “would try to be inclusive of African-American names.” A sampling of popular names that could be used include Keisha, Jamal and Deshawn, according to the paper.

If you don’t want to do the time, stay offline. Or at the very least, don’t “friend” your probation officer.

Convicted of possessing methamphetamine and Ecstasy, Scott W. Roby learned that the hard way. The Louisville man had his probation revoked this month — and was sentenced to two years in prison — in part for violating conditions that required him to stay alcohol-free and out of bars and liquor stores.

Roby had invited his probation officer to be his friend on Facebook, then Roby posted pictures of himself drinking — including one in which he was holding a beer while posed next to “Buddy Bat,” the mascot for the Louisville Bats, said prosecutor Dinah Koehler.

In another Facebook post, according to court records, Roby asked: “Anyone wanna go get smashed tonight one last time before the end of the Earth?”

The change in Oxycontin formulation had a second, deadlier effect. Oxycodone is a lipid (fat)-soluble molecule, so the drug crosses nasal membranes quickly—almost as quickly as when the drug is injected. Most users of oxycodone were content to snort the drug, as the benefit of injecting was not worth dissolving the crushed tablets and using needles. But heroin burns when it is ‘insufflated’ or snorted, and the molecule crossed lipid membranes more slowly— providing reasons to inject the drug. Many patients tell me that they never considered using needles when Oxycontin was around, but that the only way to get similar effects from heroin was by injecting the drug. In other words, the change in formulation of Oxycontin resulted in an increase in intravenous drug abuse.

According to New Mexico state police, the mother of Velasquez’s nine-year-old son noticed unusual track marks on the boy’s neck and took him to the hospital. There, the youngster told investigators about how his dad would inject him with heroin sometimes. The police then arrested Velasquez, who’s now facing charges of child abuse and contributing to a delinquency of a minor.

The Ecuadorian government imposed a 72-hour nationwide ban on sales and consumption of alcohol after 21 people died from drinking homemade aguardiente made with methanol.

The announcement was made Sunday during a press conference at which a number officials took part including Health Minister David Chiriboga and Security Minister Homero Arellano, and at which a national health emergency was declared.

A source at Arellano’s office told Efe that the ban on booze is in force for all types of liquors, but only homemade alcohol will be subject to summary confiscation.

Authorities had already declared the health emergency and alcohol ban in Los Rios province, where the deaths took place and where some 9,000 liters (2,400 gallons) of homemade liquor were seized.

UFOs and aliens beings have often been portrayed in mass media, whether it be movies or television shows. Most of these appearances were however heavily edited and calculated by the American government in order to communicate a specific attitude towards this mysterious phenomenon. What is the purpose of these efforts? This article looks at the fascinating history of government involvement in UFO-related movies and television shows.

Hurley was responding to a recent report on a Nashville television station about the incident. The station reported several other desks also have marks on them, ranging from initials to a dollar sign.

MODERN civilisation may not be quite as safe as we thought. Britain’s security services have been privately warning their staff that western societies are just 48 hours from anarchy.

MI5’s maxim is that society is “four meals away from anarchy”. In other words, the security agency believes that Britain could be quickly reduced to large-scale disorder, including looting and rioting in the event of a catastrophe that stops the supply of food.

Never Forget 9/11 Religion was the cause.

Pollution in the Puget Sound is such a problem that a group trying to protect the ecosystem spent $27,000 in state money to make a catchy video, complete with dance steps, telling people how they can do something about it.

Pick up dog poop.

He changed the menu at Polk County’s jail, directing cooks to dish up less-expensive food. He banned basketball, ordering inmates to uproot the jail’s hoops. And he changed the jail’s TV options to favor educational viewing rather than sports and violent programming.

“Why shouldn’t they pay like the rest of us pay?” the sheriff said. “We pay to maintain the county jail; to keep them there. Certainly they can pay their way as much as they can afford.”

“This is the county jail; it’s not a welfare program,” he said.

A NASA video from a time of great optimism about space exploration. The Apollo missions were completed and the Space Shuttle program was underway. How soon before cheap and frequent flights to space would allow the construction of O’Neal colonies and mining camps on the Moon? This visionary approach calls for tiered greenhouses in space and unlimited solar power beamed back to Earth… all before the year 2000!

✖ Murdoch news sites defaced, brought down by hackers

LulzSec, the group of hackers that said three weeks ago it was disbanding, claimed credit Monday for defacing Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper website, while an allied group, Anonymous, claimed credit for a denial-of-service attack that brought down the website of The Times, another Murdoch paper. The Sunday Times and News International sites also appeared to be down Monday.

“Tango down,” Anonymous said on its Twitter page about The Times. Meanwhile, late Monday, those who went to the Sun’s website were redirected to a website that looked like The Sun with a fake story that said Murdoch’s body had been found in his garden. Then they were taken to LulzSec’s Twitter page, where the group proclaimed:

“TheSun.co.uk now redirects to our twitter feed. Hello, everyone that wanted to visit The Sun!,” then followed with this: “”We have joy, we have fun, we have messed up Murdoch’s Sun.”

And Los Angeles does not appear to be alone in grappling with a recent upsurge in graffiti, which is turning up in some unlikely places. A bumper crop of scrawls is blossoming in many modest-size communities across the country — in places like Florence, Ala.; Bernalillo County, N.M.; Taylors, S.C.; and in larger cities like Nashville and Portland, Ore. — even as major cities like Chicago, Denver, New York and Seattle say vigilant antigraffiti campaigns have spared them thus far.

“It’s popped up all of a sudden in the last six months,” said Tim Sandrell, the owner of Safari Adventures in Hair in Florence. “I’ve been downtown for 10 years, and I’m really disappointed that we are seeing this kind of activity. We have a beautiful city and an historic city, and it’s really upsetting to me seeing this going on.”

On physical examination, the breasts were symmetrical having no nodes or retractions. In the plantar region of the patient’s left foot, there was a well-formed nipple was surrounded by areola and hair on the surface, measuring 4.0 cm in diameter, with no palpable nodes (Figs. 1 and 2). The remaining physical examination was normal, including the mammary line. Results of the following laboratory tests were normal: complete blood count, fasting serum glucose level, urine exam, electrolytes, serum urea and creatinine. No alterations were found during ultrasound of the lesion and urinary tract.

Ever get the heebie-jeebies at a wax museum? Feel uneasy with an anthropomorphic robot? What about playing a video game or watching an animated movie, where the human characters are pretty realistic but just not quite right and maybe a bit creepy? If yes, then you’ve probably been a visitor to what’s called the “uncanny valley.”

The phenomenon has been described anecdotally for years, but how and why this happens is still a subject of debate in robotics, computer graphics and neuroscience. Now an international team of researchers, led by Ayse Pinar Saygin of the University of California, San Diego, has taken a peek inside the brains of people viewing videos of an uncanny android (compared to videos of a human and a robot-looking robot).

PRIMORDIAL instincts that drive animals to seek out salt may be governed by the same mechanism that drives drug addicts to hunt down their fix.

Researchers deprived mice and rats of salt, then offered them salty water to drink. After killing the animals they examined gene activity in the hypothalamus, the brain’s “reward” centre. They found that gratification genes had been activated – the same genes that are active in cocaine and heroin addicts when their craving has been satisfied.

The cases are jarring and similar to those involving PCP in the 1970s. Some of the recent incidents include a man in Indiana who climbed a roadside flagpole and jumped into traffic, a man in Pennsylvania who broke into a monastery and stabbed a priest, and a woman in West Virginia who scratched herself “to pieces” over several days because she thought there was something under her skin.

In the ’60s, a lot of people were experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs including marijuana, LSD and everything in between. You had acid rock posters in San Francisco associated with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and groups like that.

But my theory is that there were probably a lot of artists that didn’t necessarily want to do psychedelic-style art that were still influenced by the experience and created works that don’t necessarily look psychedelic in the stereotypical way, but may be conceptually psychedelic or have a kind of philosophical way of looking at the world. story.serra.maze.gi.jpg

If you look at a lot of different styles in art of the past 50 years, you can see the influence of psychedelics, ranging from sculpture that looks very minimal like Richard Serra’s giant, spiral, mazelike structures, to something like Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” there’s an interest in having art be experiential…

Jake and Dinos Chapman’s new two-part show at London’s White Cube galleries are presided over by a troupe of ghoulish Nazis with smiley-face armbands and a horde of schoolgirls with animal faces. Just two distinctive touches in an exhibition that makes a virtue of bad taste

Warning: contains images that some people may find offensive

✖ Colo. Woman Accused Of Groping TSA Agent In Ariz.

Authorities say a Colorado woman who allegedly groped a female Transportation Security Administration agent at Phoenix’s international airport is facing a felony count of sexual abuse.

Phoenix police say 61-year-old Yukari Mihamae is accused of grabbing the left breast of the unidentified TSA agent Thursday afternoon at an airport checkpoint.

TSA staff say Mihamae refused to be go through passenger screening and became argumentative before she squeezed and twisted the agent’s breast with both hands.

Your laptop, with all its sensitive data and/or ill-gotten gains, is about to be confiscated by the authorities, who are banging on the door. There’s no time to reformat it—you’ve got to destroy it, fast.

This sticker will help you do just that, provided you’ve a drill by your side. (And which self-respecting cyber criminal wouldn’t?)

Meant to be placed directly above your laptop’s hard disk, the sticker sports a crosshair with which you can accurately destroy any digital evidence the cops are after.

Randy Sarafan, who created the stickers, advises to “research the build of your laptop and locate the position of your hard drive”.

While Congress and the President fight it out over the debt ceiling and all of America quietly shudders over whether our economy will completely default on itself, at least one industry still hums along without a care in the world. Amidst a fiscal crisis of apparently apocalyptic proportions, where the GOP demands dollar for dollar spending cuts from the budget in order to raise our debt limit, the Pentagon asked Congress for $264 million to cover part of a $771 million overrun on the F-35 program. The Hill reports Republican Senator John McCain let the news slip via Twitter, saying “Congress notified that first F-35 jets have cost overruns of $771M. Outrageous! Pentagon asking for $264M down payment now. Disgraceful.”

On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.

This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. The Defense Department wants to deeply grok social media dynamics. So SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the “formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes)” on social media, according to Darpa’s announcement.

Cut into the flesh with nails and makeshift blades, rubbed into the wounds with a mixture of melted black rubber seals, ground red brick, trash bins, batteries, and saliva — these tattoos are forbidden in the South African prison system. Despite the severe penalties and permanent stigma, tattooing persists. For her photo study Life After, Cape Town photographer Araminta de Clermont sought out former inmates of “Numbers” prison gangs who were struggling for acceptance and survival since being released after years, sometimes decades of incarceration and shot their portraits in their current environment. Faces. Signs. A sailor’s grave. A note to a deceased mother, inked across the forehead. These full body and facial tattoos serve as narratives of crime history and life struggle. See the compelling images in our gallery.

A bill that seeks to clamp down on online child pornography is raising some alarms in the tech and privacy communities because of a provision that would require Internet service providers to store users’ IP addresses for 18 months.

The legislation, spearheaded by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), would require Internet providers and possibly other entities to retain that information to aid law enforcement investigations of child exploitation.

The bill already has some notable support, namely from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

However, it also faces tough criticism from tech companies and public interest groups, which believe the section on data retention is too broad, threatens Web users’ privacy and may not accomplish its stated goal of cracking down on child pornography.

Officials are pushing for a settlement with mortgage companies that, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, “would broadly absolve the firms of wrongdoing in exchange for penalties reaching $30 billion and assurances that the firms will adhere to better practices.”

Why the rush to settle? As far as I can tell, there are two principal arguments being made for letting the banks off easy. The first is the claim that resolving the mortgage mess quickly is the key to getting the housing market back on its feet. The second, less explicitly stated, is the claim that getting tough with the banks would undermine broader prospects for recovery.

Neither of these arguments makes much sense.

Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbiz reporter who was the first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead, the Guardian has learned.

Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, is said to have been found dead at his Watford home.

Hertfordshire police would not confirm his identity, but the force said in a statement: “At 10.40am today [Monday 18 July] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for the welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street. Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.

“The death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing.”

Two men face animal cruelty charges after a call reporting crying coming from a car led officers to discover several animals inside.

Miami police said officers were dispatched to Northwest 37th Avenue and Northwest Seventh Street on Monday after receiving a report that someone had heard what they thought was a baby crying in a car parked there.

The officers found no child in the car, but they did find several animals, including goats, roosters, pigeons, guinea pigs and ducks.

Police said one of the goats died later that day, but they did not elaborate on the animal’s cause of death.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. is rushing to install a cover over a building at its crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant to shield it from wind and rain as Typhoon Ma-on approaches Japan’s coast from the south.

✖ BP pipeline leaks oily mixture onto Alaskan tundra

BP reported yet another pipeline leak at its Alaskan oilfields, frustrating the oil giant’s attempts to rebuild its reputation after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

BP said on Monday that a pipeline at its 30,000 barrel per day Lisburne field, which is currently closed for maintenance, ruptured during testing and spilled a mixture of methanol and oily water onto the tundra.

The London-based company has a long history of oil spills at its Alaskan pipelines – accidents which have hurt its public image in the U.S., where around 40 percent of its assets are based.

AUTHORITIES are investigating the theft of 64 missile warheads from a train transporting military equipment to Bulgaria.

Interior ministry spokesman Marius Militaru said Sunday the components are not dangerous on their own – only when integrated into missile systems. Prosecutors said on nday they are investigating the theft.

Officials did not respond to inquiries regarding if the warheads contained explosives.

Railway workers on Saturday noticed the seals on a carriage door were broken, and it was not properly closed when the train reached Giurgiu, a Danube port that borders Bulgaria.

“They said he put gasoline in his whole house and set it on fire, and the windows are all burned out, and the door has burnout around it,” said neighbor Kara Burbano.

Police said Gauntlett walked out of the burning house and got into a fight with officers, so the officers shot him.

Holding the butcher knife, Bangs allegedly ordered the teen to take off his clothes and lie down. Bangs allegedly burned a rubber glove over the teen, letting it drip onto him and burning his abdomen, according to police.

Bangs accused the teen of being “a snitch,” according to the police report.

After dripping the burning rubber on the teen, Ismael then allegedly held a lighter close to the teen’s lips and told him not to blow it out or he would cut him. He also stuck paper up the teen’s nostrils and lit it, again telling him not to blow it out. The teen suffered burns on his lips, according to the report.

Ismael then allegedly applied a large amount of glue to the teen’s lips, gluing them together. He also used a lighter to heat up the blade of a knife and applied it to the victim’s shoulder “numerous times,” causing several burn injuries.

Narcotics agent Tom Wilde is given a second chance at life after being shot and killed. In a futuristic experiment, agent Wilde is returned to life as an Android Robot. He is sent on a very dangerous mission into the depths of the golder Triangle to rescue Sophie, a beautiful undercover agent who has been captured by the evil drug warlord Mr. Young and his inhuman creation the Vampire Beast.

“It was a sweet ride turned sour: a $1.7-million Mercedes-Benz roadster that died after cruising 10 blocks. That works out to $170,000 a block ‚Äî perhaps the most expensive test drive on record.”

Goo Shooter Controls Crowds

ASFR (alt.sex.fetish.robots)

Big enough for you?

“Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now ‚Äî before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.”

Exercise x Engrish = Fun!

Hot trend: The Leak

Rate Celebrity Plastic Surgery

“Gnomes, monsters, devils and creatures of all shapes, sizes and expressions lurk over doorways all over town. Purely decorative in intent, they differ from gargoyles, whose purpose is to funnel water off rooves.”

Police don’t have to knock, justices say

“The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that police armed with a warrant can barge into homes and seize evidence even if they don’t knock, a huge government victory that was decided by President Bush’s new justices.”

“In what appears to be a case of elephants retaliating against humans, hundreds of villagers have taken refuge on boats in Bangladesh after their homes were destroyed by rampaging pachyderms, local officials said on Wednesday.”

“Privacy advocates say the practice exposes ordinary people to ever more scrutiny by authorities while skirting legal protections designed to limit the government’s collection and use of personal data.”

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.

This is what CBS is getting sued $3.3 million for…

“Virtually none of those who complained to the Federal Communications Commission about the teen drama Without A Trace actually saw the episode in question, CBS affiliates said as they asked the agency to rescind its proposed record indecency fine of $3.3

“But can a human subsist on a constant diet of pelletized, nutritionally complete food like puppies and monkeys do? For the good of human kind, I’m about to find out. On June 3, 2006, I began my week of eating nothing but monkey chow: “a complete and bala

Pirate Party of the United States

200 lt Diet Coke x 500 Mentos

Oink!

Fantastic Four Costume Made of Real Rocks!

“I put my ring finger in Clive‚Äôs mouth and he put his ring finger in my mouth with our teeth resting right on the last joint. We looked in each other‚Äôs eyes, nodded, and bit down as hard as we could. It was a little disappointing because we couldn‚Äôt

A.R.E. Weapons

Dignity Crew!

Holy Shit!

Worse than the maggots!

Hot Doggie Style!

“The Militant Graffiti Artists of Stockholm didn’t take too kindly to the cows, and kidnapped one in the name of art…or at least in the name of anti-advertising-cluttering-up-every-bit-of-downtown-street-space. They demanded that the city declare the co

This is a site dedicated to the phenomena of quicksand and mud fetishes.

AT&T is asking a federal judge to keep those documents out of court, and to order the EFF to return them to the company. Here Wired News presents Klein’s statement in its entirety, along with select pages from the AT&T documents.

a collection of Soviet Union propaganda and advertisement posters from 1917 to 1991

“Patients say that’s the worst symptom ‚Äî strange fibers that pop out of your skin in different colors. “He’d have attacks and fibers would come out of his hands and fingers, white, black and sometimes red. Very, very painful,” said Lisa Wilson, whose so

“A GANG of anarchist Robin Hood-style thieves, who dress as superheroes and steal expensive food from exclusive restaurants and delicatessens to give to the poor, are being hunted by police in the German city of Hamburg.”

“The department distributed photographs of various items found around the bodies of 22-year-old Lindsay Cutshall and 26-year-old Jason Allen, who were each shot in the head while they slept with a .45-caliber Marlin rifle that was never found. The items i

No Satanic Messages Included

Bureau of Engraving and Printing – Large Denominations

$500, $1000, $5000, $10,000 Bills!

Drinkers shock at body in rum barrel

HUNGARIAN builders who drank their way to the bottom of a huge barrel of rum while renovating a house got a nasty surprise when a pickled corpse tumbled out of the empty barrel, a police magazine website reported.

America tests laser weapons

“In March 1918, a third-degree committee in Forsyth grilled Starr about Liberty Bonds and forced him to kiss the flag. “What is this thing anyway?” he asked. “Nothing but a piece of cotton with a little paint on it, and some other marks in the corner ther

When the government told a court Friday that it wanted a class-action lawsuit regarding the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping on Americans dismissed, its lawyers wielded one of the most powerful legal tools available to the executive branch — the

“…this marvel of engineering would play a random ending with every spin of your turntable thanks to the multiple grooves…”

Creepy

Eye-Yi-Yi!

“…a strange phenomenon known as “musical hallucinations” which is a condition very similar to having a song stuck in one’s head; but the music is considerably more true-to-life, it is heard almost non-stop, and it is practically impossible to ignore.”

Thoughts Trigger Mental Typewriter

A computerized typewriter that translates electrical impulses from brainwave signals into letters and words could be available in the next five years.

“Some scientists surmise that loud bursts of sonar, which can be heard for miles in the water, may disorient or scare marine mammals, causing them to surface too quickly and suffer the equivalent of what divers call the bends – when sudden decompression f

GOOOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLLL!!!

“I’ve covered murders, grisly accidents, airplanes falling out of the sky and, occasionally, dirty politics. But in nearly two decades of journalism, nothing has made my insides churn like seeing what my 13-year-old daughter and her friends are up to on M

This dude inspired me, when I was young, with his Dead Kennedys art. Awesome stuff!

A wet T-shirt contest five years ago when she was in high school is still haunting Monica Pippin.

“Memo to those considering entering the exciting field of Ecstasy production: It’s probably not a good idea to set up your illicit drug lab via purchases on eBay, which apparently is being closely monitored by nosy Drug Enforcement Administration agents.”

Fuckin’ Sneaker Nerds!

Fuckin’ Crazy!

Return of the Monkey Cowboy

Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none has agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have

“This will speak very much to children… they’ll hear the creak of the wood, smell the smell of the dung”

It’s 4/20 Duuuuuuuude!

Decapitated heads of police officials found in Acapulco

The heads of Acapulco Preventive Police Commander Mario Nunez Magana and Preventive Police Officer Jesus Alberto Ibarra were accompanied by a red sign with black lettering that warned, “So that you learn to respect.”

Harper’s Weekly Review

Catch up with current events with this weekly news summary, well worth email subscribing to.

“A 55-year-old man presented with intermittent, crampy pain in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen. A colonoscopy was ordered and revealed multiple mobile 1-cm worms, Enterobius vermicularis, in the cecum.”

Zoom In From the Milky Way to subatomic particles

Blog Gangsigns

2000 Year-Old Counterfeit Coin!

“Paige was making a “drug education presentation” in April 2004 to a Florida youth group when his firearm (a Glock .40) accidentally discharged. The shooting occurred moments after Paige told the children that he was the only person in the room profession

Slightly Used

Plainfield property where killer Ed Gein lived is up for auction on eBay

“This is the land where Ed Gein lived. Wisconsin’s most famous murderer, until Jeffrey Dahmer, was arrested on this land in November 1957. Inside the ramshackle farmhouse – which burned down shortly before the property was auctioned the following March –

Oook oook ooook!

Everything you ever wanted to know about Jack The Ripper…but were afraid to ask!

Old School Style Video Game

“Troy Lee Mosby placed his signature “Syrup” tag on the walls, beds, tables, locker and mirrors of six cell blocks at the Milwaukee County House of Correction, according to a criminal complaint filed Thursday.”

Fuck A Metrocard!

Yeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!

“The Ryugyong Hotel is, in my opinion, the single most unsettling structure ever erected by the hand of man. It‚Äôs 1,082 feet tall, has 105 floors, and encloses 3.9 million square feet of floor space. And it is completely empty. It doesn‚Äôt even have wi

“While in the holding cell, she removed a .25-caliber semiautomatic from her vaginal cavity.”

“AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’ internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a for

‘Star Wars Kid’ cuts a deal with his tormentors

“…one of the world’s first and most-publicized cases of cyber-bullying.”

The long, strange trip continues for Jerry Garcia’s toilet. Police say the Grateful Dead leader’s commode was stolen recently from a driveway along with three other toilets and a bidet.

Man held as terrorism suspect over punk song

The taxi driver had become worried on the way to the airport because Mann had been singing along to The Clash’s 1979 anthem “London Calling,” which features the lyrics “Now war is declared — and battle come down” while other lines warn of a “meltdown exp

Fuckin’ Cool…I Wan’ One!

Trippy Nature Illustrations

“For the first two years his use was an average of five pills per weekend. Gradually this escalated until he was taking around three and a half pills a day. At the peak, the man was taking an estimated 25 pills every day for four years.”

“The Portage County Hazardous Materials Unit and Bomb Detection Unit were called in to downtown Ravenna on Friday morning after seventeen suspicious packages — boxes wrapped in gold wrapping paper with question marks spray painted on them — had alarmed

weird poodle workout video

Brain Cells Fused with Computer Chip

“The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed “neuro-chips” in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together.”

Creepy!

The PimpStar is a huge leap forward in the evolution of the wheel. With the PimpStar’s built-in full color LED lights, microprocessor and wireless modem, you can display virtually any image, including text, graphics, logos, and even digital photos!